


Clearing Out for Some New Delight

by Em_Jaye



Series: The Long Way Around [34]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Darcy Lewis Feels, F/M, Family Dynamics, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Teacher Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23624110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/pseuds/Em_Jaye
Summary: Woody Allen once said, 'If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans." With that in mind, Darcy had to wonder if there was anyone who could make God laugh quite like Steve Rogers.February 1976: Changes
Relationships: Darcy Lewis & Janet Van Dyne, Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers
Series: The Long Way Around [34]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1402126
Comments: 65
Kudos: 202





	Clearing Out for Some New Delight

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Rumi's poem "The Guest House" which I highly recommend in these dark and difficult times.
> 
> Also, this fic is kind of a mess of feelings. But I, myself, am also a mess of feelings. I think we all are.

Tangie’s son was born two weeks early, sending his mother into labor in the middle of her workday and cancelling his parents’ upcoming Valentine’s Day plans. Jesse Howard Waters came into the world at 3pm on a Thursday which, considering Tangie ducked out of their ten o’clock meeting to head up to the maternity ward, Darcy thought was pretty impressive until she overhead Tangie’s doctor telling her she’d probably been in labor for at least a day but—in true Tangie fashion—had been pretending she wasn’t until her water broke and she couldn’t pretend anymore.

He was a beautiful boy; soft brown skin and fuzzy black hair and perfect little fingers which he curled around Darcy’s thumb the moment she held him. She’d known she was going to love him as soon as Tangie had told her she was pregnant, but she hadn’t expected the way her heart swelled and tears pricked her eyes when Darren had placed the bundle of squirmy blankets in her arms and said with a smile, “Say hello, Aunt Darcy.”

That had been hours ago and by the time Tina and Alice and Linda had arrived with flowers and teddy bears, Jesse had had a full day of making everyone fall in love with him. He was back in his mother’s arms, happily snoozing against her chest while Linda helped fix the scarf around Tangie’s hair to keep it out of her face.

Linda peered down at the baby’s sleeping face and ran her finger along his cheek with a soft smile. She kissed the top of Tangie’s head. “You did good, Mama.”

Tangie grinned and looked up from her son. “I did, didn’t I?”

Alice looked up from where she’d been reading all the cards and well-wishes placed along the windowsill and met Darcy’s eyes. “Okay,” she said abruptly. “Your turn.”

Darcy snorted and rolled her eyes. “Okay.”

“But really,” Tina put in from her seat on the edge of Tangie’s hospital bed. “When are you and Steve going to have one of these?”

“A beautiful black baby?” Darcy asked with a laugh. “Not sure that's likely, T.”

“You leave her alone,” Tangie laughed, deflecting the question for her.

“ _Pfft!”_ the sound came from Alice. “You’ve been asking her for a baby since before she and Steve even knew they were a couple.”

“Yeah, well,” Tangie’s shoulder rolled in a shrug. “This was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” she relented. “I don’t blame her for wanting to wait.”

Linda smiled and retucked the tail of Tangie’s silk scarf. “And this was the easy part.”

Tangie’s smile fell. “No, no no,” she shook her head. “Don’t tell me that.”

A nurse in a pink sweater over her white uniform appeared in the doorway. “I’m sorry, girls, but it’s time for mommy and baby to get some rest.”

Darcy caught the way Tangie rolled her eyes when the nurse wasn’t looking. She grinned. They’d been working in a hospital long enough to know that all the maternity nurses talked like pre-school teachers, especially when the delivery had been as smooth and normal as this one. There was a round of kisses and hugs and promises of casseroles delivered to the house so the new parents wouldn’t have to cook before they were hurried out of the room, and then the ward, in a pack.

Tina and Alice peeled away to different cars while Linda hung back, digging for her keys. She waited until the doors had closed behind the younger two women before she pulled them out and dropped an arm around Darcy’s shoulder. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she said quickly.

Linda kept her arm there while they walked slowly toward the exit. “You know they’re all just joking, right?”

“I know,” Darcy said evenly, because she did. She wasn’t upset by the harmless prodding of her friends. She just wasn’t sure she could put what she was feeling into words. How holding Jesse and hearing herself referred to as ‘Aunt Darcy’ had stirred up all the memories of everything she’d wanted to do with Barrett and had brought with it an all-too-familiar mix of happiness and sadness and longing for a life she was never going back to.

“Is it something you even want?” Linda asked, making Darcy’s brow wrinkle in confusion. She continued. “It’s just, anytime someone brings up the idea of you and Steve having a baby, you laugh it off. Do you…not want to have kids?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not that,” she said firmly, because it _wasn’t._ Darcy had never been the type to have a solid plan for her life, but she’d always wanted to have kids. Meeting and falling in love with Steve had only cemented that decision. Holding Jesse had just reminded her that, yes, she very much wanted a baby of her own. She glanced over at Linda with a smile. “You’ve seen Steve,” she added. “Who wouldn’t want to make a baby with him?”

“I wasn’t going to bring up _that_ obvious fact,” Linda returned her grin.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Thinking about it just makes everything that much more permanent,” she blurted out without thinking.

She fought the urge to smack a hand to her mouth. It was still a reflex in her thinking that she hadn’t found a way to control. A worry she held onto that she’d always feel stuck with one foot in this time and one forty years in the future. That every major thing she did would always carry with it a thought of ‘If I do this, I’m _definitely_ not going back.’ And thinking that would cause her to remind herself that she’d already decided she wasn’t going back. That the _someday_ she and Steve had talked about could be whatever day they wanted.

And maybe that’s what was scaring her the most. That she could have the things she wanted— _they_ wanted—if she was brave enough to have the scary conversations that would turn them from someday possibilities into very realistic, hopeful realities.

Beside her, without any of this context, Linda looked appropriately confused. “You and Steve are married,” she reminded gently. “You have a house and a pet and jobs…” she lifted her eyebrows expectantly. “What about all of that isn’t permanent?”

Steve was on the couch when she got home. A basketball game she knew he wasn’t watching was on the tv while he was bent over a coffee table strewn with a collection of art history books, the yellow legal pads he was fond of for lesson planning, and a half-eaten package of Oreos. He smiled when he looked up. “Everybody good?” he asked as she unwound her scarf and came across the room to kiss him.

She smiled back. “Practically perfect in every way,” she recited from _Mary Poppins._ It was also what her mother had said about every newborn baby she’d ever held. Even the ugly ones—which Jesse was not.

“I'm going to stop in after work tomorrow and say hi,” he said, having been unable to join her thanks to a faculty meeting with an unending agenda.

“She’ll be there,” Darcy assured him. “I think she said they’ll probably send her home on Saturday or Sunday.”

“I made dinner,” Steve said, surprising her before he added. “But it’s terrible so I ordered Chinese.”

She snorted. “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she lied. “What’d you make?”

“It was supposed to be beef stew,” he called after her while she made her way into the kitchen.

She wrinkled her nose and hooked a hand under Scrabble’s belly, heaving him off the counter. “I didn’t know we had beef.”

“We had ground beef,” he said from the living room. “Turns out it doesn’t all work the same in a recipe.”

Darcy snickered and bravely opened the lid of the Dutch oven on the stovetop. She peered inside. The stew Steve had attempted looked more like a confused pasta sauce. With carrots and potatoes that looked either too mushy or not quite cooked enough, a broth she would have bet money was made of ketchup and water, and crumbles of slightly burnt ground beef. She steeled herself and brought a wooden spoonful to her lips.

Terrible. Just as Steve had said. Somehow bland and too salty with flavors mingling that had no business anywhere near one another. She dropped the spoon back onto the plate beside the stove and stuck out her tongue. “It’s not…the worst thing you’ve ever made,” she called back out diplomatically.

Steve laughed. “Chinese is in the fridge. I didn’t know how long you’d be.”

Her chicken and broccoli reheated quickly, and she dropped down onto the couch with a bowl in a few minutes. She ate without really tasting it, watching the way Steve’s brow furrowed in concentration while he took notes. The way his fingers moved, flipping from one book to the next, marking pages and sticking papers beside certain images to return later. She knew he was working on the final project for his seniors—the students he’d started with at Skyline. His favorites. The ones who kept signing up for his classes again and again.

There was another notepad, closest to her, that read _Adjustments: Patrick, Jason, Connie._ He’d also written, lower _Paramount—Art History movies. March._ Patrick and Jason had checkmarks beside them.

“What kind of adjustments are you making?” she asked idly, pulling one leg up beneath her.

Steve looked over, confused for a second before she pointed to his list. “Uh, Jason can hardly read, and no one in the English department seems to want to fix that problem,” he shook his head. “So, I want to make sure whatever artist I assign him has enough examples available that he can look at and get a feel for them without having to wade through the opinions of a dozen different critics. And I think if I can time it right, he might be able to see a movie about at least one of them at The Paramount before the project is due.” He seemed to remember something and flipped back through his original notepad. “And Patrick can’t focus on anything more than a minute because I’m pretty sure he has ADHD but no one’s going to tell him that until he’s forty—” he paused and scribbled something down. “So, I’ve got a list of animators he might like if for no other reason than he made this flipbook back in October that was amazing, and it was the only time I’ve ever seen anything hold his attention.”

Darcy clamped a piece of chicken with her chopsticks. “ _I shouldn’t be a teacher,_ he said. _I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to teach teenagers,_ he said,” she grinned when he looked up at her. “What about Connie?”

“Connie’s the easiest,” he said pointedly ignoring the delight she took in getting to say, ‘I told you so’. “She’s just got a…chaotic homelife,” Darcy watched him choose the word carefully. “I’m only making sure I have enough resources at school so she can get the books she needs there instead of hoping she’ll go to the library in her free time.”

“Because she won’t?” Darcy guessed with a frown.

“Because she won’t,” Steve echoed.

Another comfortable silence sat down with them while Steve worked, and Darcy ate and Scrabble begged with soft whines and exaggerated headbutts for a piece of her chicken.

“Question,” Darcy said after what felt like a long time. She bent to one side and set her bowl down for Scrabble to lick the remains of rice and brown sauce.

“Answer,” Steve replied without looking up from his books.

“Would you be okay if—and _please_ for the love of God, be honest—” she added quickly before she went on, “if I…just…didn’t refill my birth control next week?”

Steve blinked and stopped what he was writing mid-sentence. She held her breath, watching the idea slide over him slowly. His brow furrowed before it relaxed, realizing what she was asking. Suggesting. When he looked up, there was a small, barely-there smile in the corner of his lips. “Yeah,” he said finally, and gave a little shrug of his shoulders. “I’d—uh—” he coughed. “I’d be okay with that.”

“Cool,” she said, trying a little too hard to pull of nonchalance with the way she nodded, hoping to hide how an unexpected wave of relief had almost knocked her off the couch. “Cool,” she said again. “Will you share those Oreos with me?”

He laughed softly and shook his head before he reached over and brought the package to the space between them on the couch.

***

The bar was relatively quiet for a Friday night when, a week later, Darcy had agreed to meet Janet for a drink after work. Spotting her friend already waiting in a cramped corner booth, Darcy made her way over quickly and shrugged out of her coat.

“Hey,” she said, sliding into the seat. “Sorry if I’m late.”

“You’re not,” Janet assured her. There was a basket of French fries on the table and two gin and tonics. “I just…” she fidgeted. Darcy frowned. Janet wasn’t really a fidgeter. “I got here early.”

“Okay…” Darcy said slowly. She helped herself to a fry. “What’s up? How are you? I haven’t seen you in a million years.”

Not a million. But a little over a month. They’d been missing each other with conflicting schedules and lives getting busier bit by bit.

“I’m good,” Janet said with a nod before she stopped and shook her head. “No, I’m not good. I’m _great_. I got a job.”

Darcy blinked. “You…have a job?” Janet had been teaching middle school science across the bay and—last Darcy had heard—hating every second of it. It didn’t surprise her that she’d been looking for something new.

“No,” Janet shook her head again. “No, Darcy. I got a _real_ job. As a physicist.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh my God!”

“I know!”

“Janet!” she exclaimed. “That’s amazing! Congratulations! Tell me everything!”

“It’s the craziest thing,” Janet said, practically glowing with excitement. “I never really thought anything would ever come of it, but then I got this call from DC and a few people came out last week to meet with me in person—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Darcy held up her hand. “Go back. You never thought anything would come of what?”

Janet took a breath and sipped at her drink. She seemed to force herself to settle but her eyes kept sparkling like a kid’s on Christmas. “Okay, remember back a million years ago when I told you about what happened at Tahoe?” she lifted her sculpted eyebrows. “All of Tim’s and my research being taken?”

Darcy felt her heart stutter unexpectedly. “Didn’t you say it was all taken by the government?”

“Yes,” she said around another bubble of exhilaration. “That’s who wants me to work for them! The Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate,” she said it slowly, deliberately, like she’d been practicing.

Praying her face didn’t betray the sinking feeling in her chest, Darcy forced herself to smile. “That’s a mouthful,” she managed. “Does that all fit on a business card?”

Janet didn’t notice the shift in Darcy’s reaction to her news. “No,” she shook her head. “They go by SHIELD—I think I told you that before? I can’t remember. Anyway, they called and they want me to come to DC and work for them. Can you believe it? I thought they’d just steal all my work and I’d be stuck serving coffee or teaching seventh graders my whole life.”

“That was never going to happen,” Darcy insisted, trying to produce clear thoughts over the rising din in her head. The din that was a whirling mess of newspaper headlines and documentary titles and episodes of _Unsolved Mysteries_ about how the brilliant physicist, Janet Van Dyne, had disappeared without a trace in 1987. Leaving her daughter Hope, a swirl of suspicion around her husband, and a dark cloud over the legacy of her work. “I told you, you were always bound for greatness.”

Greatness that was going to save the world someday. And steal thirty years of her friend’s life in the process. Wildly, the thought of blurting all this out, of telling Janet exactly what was waiting for her if she decided to work for SHIELD, tumbled to the tip of her tongue. Breaking all the rules and laying out step-by-step what would happen on that mission in ’87. Begging Janet not to go, to not become one more person she might never see again.

“Yeah,” Janet scoffed. “But I never really thought anyone else would agree with you.” She grabbed a fry to crunch into. “But then out of the blue, this guy Pym called me and told me he wants me on his team—” she shook her head in disbelief. “Fully funded. I’m going to have my own lab and an assistant and—” her face fell. “What’s wrong? You look sad.”

All the things Darcy wanted to say evaporated and it was suddenly all she could do not let the lump in her throat bring any tears to the surface. “No, I’m not sad,” she lied. Because she _couldn’t_ tell Janet everything she was thinking. She couldn’t do anything to make her stay. Even if she could somehow convince her of what was going to happen, there was nothing to say her accident in ’87 wouldn’t happen anyway. Or that, in trying to save Janet, she might be setting something much worse into motion.

The truth was simple and painful and had wrapped its fingers around Darcy’s heart, making it hard to breathe as she did her best to make her smile convincing. Janet had to go and work for SHIELD because that’s what she’d always done. She had to work with Hank Pym and live through everything that would follow after that if for no other reason than in 2023, Scott Lang had to come back from the Quantum Realm and hand Steve Rogers the key to undoing a universe-wide massacre.

Her own feelings seemed pretty inconsequential in comparison.

“I’m _so_ happy for you, Jan,” she reached across the table to cover Janet’s hand with hers. “You’re going to be amazing and Hank Pym—whoever he is—is so lucky to have you to work with. I just—” her vision blurred, and she forced a laugh and swiped at her eyes. “I just realized how much I’m going to miss you if you have to move to DC.”

Janet’s glimmer dimmed for a second. “I know,” she said. “I’m really going to miss you too.” She brightened again. “But it’s not like I’ll never see you again,” she laughed softly. “I’ll come back for visits and you guys can come see me in Washington.”

“Right,” Darcy nodded, pushing a smile back onto her face. “We will. Of course, we will,” she promised. “It’ll be great. Keep talking,” she urged, squeezing Janet’s thin arm again. “Tell me everything.”

She did. She went on and on about the way Pym had gushed over her work, how generous of a salary she’d been offered and where she’d be living in DC. She was a kind of excited Darcy had never seen before. Every part of her sparkled, like she’d finally been brought to life, allowed to see the sun for the first time.

And that, Darcy knew, was the real reason she wasn’t going to say anything.

Not just because it would break the rules, not just because Janet would likely not even believe her, but because it would kill her to stay here. Here, she was safe but also so unhappy, so unappreciated, with all her talent and brilliance wasted. Here, Darcy could keep her friend, but the sadder version of her. The quiet version who didn’t believe in herself because there was never a chance to prove that she was anything special. She _was_ special. And she deserved every chance she was going to get.

The car was cold when she got in, the heater took a long time to get going and by the time her hands started to warm up, Darcy’s head hurt from everything she’d been keeping inside.

The mingling joy and grief that being around Jesse had stirred up; joy for all the things she was going to do with him, all the ways she was going to help him grow up, make sure he knew how much she loved him. Grief for all the things she’d never get to do with her own nephew, whose mother and father hadn’t even been thought of yet. All the kisses she’d never give Barrett, cards and presents she’d never send, stories she’d never read.

The terrifying idea that when she and Steve _did_ have a baby, she’d have to do all of motherhood without her own mother and sister; a terror that was wrapped in reassurance that she had plenty of women, plenty of mothers in her life, that she would be fine—loved and cared for and _fine—_ even if it would never be quite the same.

And now this piece of her heart that Janet would take with her. The overwhelming sense of knowing she’d done the right thing by keeping her mouth shut and the undeniable urge to jump out of her car and race down the street after her to tell her the truth and beg her to change her mind.

But she didn’t. The doors stayed locked and the car stayed on and Darcy stayed behind the wheel.

And she cried the whole drive home.

**Author's Note:**

> Come play with me on tumblr: @idontgettechnology and join me at ishipitpod.com for weekly podcast on fandom and fanfic by yours truly.
> 
> *kisses*  
> <3


End file.
